Research
Research Interests
Old English language and literature, Middle English language and literature, medieval historiography, medieval regional culture, philology, digital humanities.
Books | Essays | Editions | Reviews & Reports | Recordings | Projects | Full Curriculum Vitae
Books
Regionalism and Identity in Medieval England (in
preparation)
Abstract
A Handbook of Philological Methods, with
Michael D.C. Drout
This project, which is in its initial conceptual
stages, is intended to be an introduction for graduate
students to the methods and uses of philology for
addressing the critical issues which occupy Old
English and Middle English studies today. The initial
work will take the form of a series of articles
to be published in The Heroic
Age.
Essays
Note: To read online versions, you must have Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or later.
"Frið and Fredom: Royal Forests
and English Jurisprudence in La3amon's Brut."
(under revision for publication in Modern
Philology)
Traces the development of the Anglo-Saxon jurisprudential
principle of frið from pre-Conquest usage to its
adoption as a term for the royal forest in La3amon's
Brut. Argues that vernacular writers continued
to use Old English legal terminology after the
Norman Conquest as a means of engaging with and
commenting on legal issues, even after most official
legal discourse had shifted to Latin.
"Service." In Reading
The Lord of the Rings, ed. Robert
Eaglestone (London: Continuum, 2006), pp.
138-148.
Argues that The Lord of the
Rings reflects upon the history of service and its continued viability as a form of social cooperation. Tolkien explores the strengths and weakness of historical service cultures from Anglo-Saxon to Edwardian England in order to confront the associations between social deference and social exploitation which problematise service cultures in the twentieth century.
"Animal
Imagery and Oral Discourse in Havelok's First
Fight." Viator:
Medieval and Renaissance Studies 35
(2004): 311-327.
Examines the poets use of Anglo-Scandinavian folk
material and popular animal imagery to examine
relationships between truth and meaning. The poet's
inconsistent imagery and multiple narrative perspectives
evoke the textual variations produced by oral transmission.
I argue that the poet consciously adopts this feature
of oral discourse in order to draw attention to
its fallibility as a conveyor of historical veracity
and direct the readers attention to its deeper
truths about the multiple ways in which humans
experience bondage.
"The
Æðelen of Engle:
Constructing Ethnic and Regional Identities
in La3amon's Brut." Exemplaria:
A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance
Studies 16.1 (2004): 95-130.
Examines the depiction of Scandinavians in English
texts of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries in
order to assess La3amon's perspective on the cultural
diversity of post-Conquest England. La3amon's portrayal
of the Scandinavian role in British history reveals
both a western bias against easterners claims to
legal freedoms based on supposed Scandinavian ancestry
and a model for the assimilation of foreign cultures
based on loyalty to the king.
"The
Legend of Havelok the Dane and the Historiography
of East Anglia." Studies
in Philology 100:3 (2003): 245-277.
Argues that the names found in the Havelok legend provide evidence of its origins in the historiographical tradition of East Anglia, a learned and literate enterprise that attempted to establish an identity for the region. Certain elements of the tale were invented by Gaimar in his Estoire
des Engleis based on elements in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian historical literature (some of which can be traced in Scandinavian sources). Later adapters of the tale sometimes turning back to Gaimar and sometimes to sources similar to those he had used, in order to enhance its credentials as local history or to show how the Danish presence in East Anglia participated in the development of English social and legal institutions. The popularization of the Havelok story provides a model of the way the ideas of learned historiographers reached and influenced a much broader audience.
"Iron-Clad
Evidence in Early Medieval Dialectology: Old
English isern, isen, and iren." Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen 98:4 (1997): 371-390.
Explores the three forms of the Old English word
for iron using electronic corpus compiled for the Dictionary
of Old English. Disproves the Oxford English
Dictionary's statement that iren was the poetic
form of the word by showing that this theory is
based only on the evidence of Beowulf. Evidence
from the larger corpus shows that this form arose
in the West Midlands in the ninth century, and
the dominance of iren over the more usual poetic
form isern provides powerful evidence that the
poem was composed or transmitted in a West Mercian
dialect.
Editions
Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender. For the Broadview Anthology of British Literature (Calgary: Broadview Press). "October" forthcoming in 2007. "January," "April," "November," and "December" forthcoming in 2008.
Reviews and Reports
Review of Andrew Galloway, Medieval Literature and Culture (London: Continuum, 2006) (forthcoming in Comitatus).
Review of Thomas Bredehoft, Early English Metre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Comitatus 38 (2007): xxx-xxx.
Entries in The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2006).
"Sigelwara Land," "Philology: General Works, 1924-1927," " King Horn," "Saxo Grammaticus," "Iþþlen in Sawles Warde"
Entries in the International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages-Online. Brepols Publishers, 2004-2005.
"The Normans in Britain and Ireland” and “The Normans in Britain and Ireland: Post-1154"
Review of Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Envoi: A Review Journal of Medieval Literature 10.2 (2004 for Fall 2001): 108-121.
Anglo-Saxon Studies in North America. Newsletter of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI) (Summer 2004): 6-7.
Recordings
A Recitation of Cleanness. The Chaucer Studio (Recorded at the 38th International Congress on Medieval Studies, 9-11 May 2003 in Kalamazoo, MI).